9:57 am | 17 September 2004 | cross-country

seriously y'all. thislife.org, '04 archives. wuuuuh.

so, here are some random pictures from the last two weeks. I thought of wonderful updates about my vacation but forgot them all in the ensuing mayhem (I wish there were a word that meant "mayhem of happi- and sadness," like you are just in a carnival-pirate-ship of your lifetime, "sorrownado" maybe?) and now I am kind of just very tired.

This lady with the most amazing lavender 'do was sitting on front of me as I sat on the train trying to go to LAX. Turns out a Japanese national (my mom kept saying Japanese nationalist like he was a slanty Pinko or something) had corroded batteries in his flashlight and they 'sploded, but I didn't know that. I ended up stuck in a sketchy area freaking out about terrorists until Pants came to get me. The trip did not therefore start out well.

I was on the train in the first place 'cause my car was in the shop. I got it back since my flight was cancelled, but I had to drop A GRAND on it. A GRAND. I sat outside the shop next to this roach and felt much like him. Then United charged me $100 to change my flight, the bastards. They haven't heard the end of this hooey because I'm gonna bring the noise for sure.

I had bought the fall Vogue to read on the plane. It was like 842 pages, "the biggest Vogue ever!," and weighed a metric ton (see scale of my weird thumb for comparison, left). I thought I would tear out the pointless ads to reduce its weight...but it was fully six hundred pages of pure ad (see tiny dog paw for scale, right). SUCH bullshit. I got a little mad about that one.

Joelington came to my hometown with me and we got spooky at a bar called the Anchor (at which I arrived on the back of The Buddhist Punk's moped, called a PEOPLE, for some reason, that is just so totally cute), where we also played The Boss, helped my sister ring in her 21, and ate popcorn. We had drinks with gay names and unnatural colourings, and I got tackled and messed up my ankle in the parkinglot.

In Millennium Park in Chicago, there are giant glass-block fountain things with mothers' faces that show up on them (via concealed dot-matrix screens) intermittently. Sometimes the mothers spit. This is a good eulogy line, come to think of it. "Sometimes the mothers spit." I wrote that, don't steal it, you bastards.

We saw many sailors in town, even off an aircraft carrier (I can tell by their uniforms 'cos I do a lot of sailor-watching), but this is the one that is the most my boyfriend.

Here is Nightmonkey! He's getting so big! And handsome! And legal! If you have a PC you can go watch him play acoustic rap, but that's it, that is all you can do. PAWS OFF MY BROTHER YOU SLUTS!

I took the Amtrak to Chicago and on the way I saw a car junkyard where they had very creatively made a barrier wall by tipping over old school buses and bakery trucks. Like I am talking about 100 buses, all laid down, and a cool van that says "Grand Rapids Barrel Company" and then, barely-explicably, "Roll out the barrels!" with merry music notes, like it's some well-known ditty.

All in all, though, I was glad to get back to my longest of beaches, where if you drive over the Vincent Thomas Bridge on a Sunday, past the piers, you can point at big structures and giggle and say, noirish and wistful, "Everywhere I go, I think of her," and if your friend doesn't get it, it's still funny to go "They look like boobs, man." LONG BEACH LOVES BOOBS!